What a surprise! GOA opened their account site to enter pre-order beta codes only hours before the open beta starts, and now the site isn't working. If you create a new account you get stuck at the third page, where you are supposed to type the letters shown in a captcha image, but no image is actually displayed. If you try to log in with an existing account, you get a "unable to process your request" error message.

Lets all say together: "I told you so!"

[EDIT: 7 pm, the European WAR servers have been up for 2 hours now. Only there are barely any players, population is shown as "low" on nearly all of them. That is because only the closed beta players are currently in the open beta. The European WAR account site from GOA is official "down for maintenance", aka "we haven't got a clue why it isn't working, but we're trying to fix it anyway".]

But they tested it and it was "solid" also able to "cope with more request than there are beta keys in the entire world" so how can it fail... Oh you said it HAS failed... I'm sure none of us saw that coming.

You can't use bittorrent directly but are forced to use their downloader... that use bittorrent technology. They (in the news) told that they renewed the downloader so that now is possible to limit upload to not choke connection. But is the same old downloader.... and no further instructions... :(

And GOA War Hammer web site is very under par in my opinion. Lacking good and easy navigation. Is slow and missing good informations that you would expect.

Despite what developers/publishers post on the internet maybe they do not really care about problems at launch if they can be fixed within a few days.

Every MMO seems to have a lot of bugs concerning the game/site at launch as if it would be some kind of law of nature. And no one seems to learn from those mistakes.

Maybe the unofficial consent is that a few days of bad or even non existent service doesn't matter, problems will be fixed sooner or later anyways and MMO players are a very tolerant and patient bunch?

The AoC devs are another good example of a very high skill in the denial and forget trait...

The torrent for the beta client is on a normal tracker, and can thus be downloaded with a normal client, found a link to it on mininova :

http://www.mininova.org/tracker/30206

My guess is that they are basically keeping quiet because they fear they have a problem which can't be fixed without at least a week worth of work. Like say re-engineering the entire account database and web interface ... the latter of which they should have done a long time ago, I mean honestly ... flash?

I've gotten as far as getting my account verified, but now I can't register the beta key ... it either 414s or 300s (database unavailable).

Same here, finaly the image showed but now its a 414 (server full) error. My details are still in so all I have to do is spam the Continue button because I'm and confident that if I closed the browser and try again later it'll say "that email and/or login is already in use"...

Trying to log in reminds me of the first LOTRO / Codemasters Closed Beta Stress test.Difference being was LOTRO's was about 4-5 months before release and Codemasters kept all testers pretty well informed via their forums...OFFICIAL forums.

Just got through to putting in my beta key in via the product key page(after lots of 414 errors) and got - "this key has expired" ??I got the key via a CE PreOrder ?I do hope that was just a "random" error and doesn't mean I cannot join the open beta.

I think GOA had a chance to show everybody they had learned from the DAOC days and that the customer care would be better handled (promises, schedules, communication...):

- Yes, client was given out early- Yes, some patches were given also

But, I would really love to hear the reasoning behind the following items:

- Communication done on forums and blogs but no linking done to these posts on eu frontpage (how is casual gamer supposed to find these posts?)- Leaving the account management testing on the last day (It's really hard to understand the reward vs risk on this, unless the stress test was intentionally left this late)- Issuing 100 000+ new beta keys during the past week, spesifically with the last day acc mgmt decision in mind (why not launch beta first and issue keys the next day?)

Now europe will be moving towards launch with little respect and trust towards the hosting company.

From WAR-EUROPE website -Our registration and authentication servers have been taken offline for maintenance. This means that it is currently not possible to create new accounts or authenticate Open Beta keys. During this maintenance we are processing all queued account registrations and key authentications. These services will be available as soon as this work is complete.

I have been trying all day - this is really bad as everyone knows an open beta (for an MMO specifically) is more like a demo of the game ....the game is ready and has gone gold therefore the account system should be ready too.

Still trying - have been all day.Apart from 414 and 300 errors constantlyI was getting errors saying I am logged in when I am not...finally got into the Product key page....passed the validation of my key (no expired message this time) only to get - "this key has already been activated"Yet cannot log in to the Mythic patcher ?

This truly is the worst open beta / account system I have ever had the misfortune to attempt to use.

As you might have expected, Mythic has been talking to GOA for the entire day about today's events. GOA is still our partner and no matter what the difficulties are right now, we must act as partners. I expect you'll be hearing more shortly.

Mark

P.S. The key Mythic personnel (including yours truly) have been involved in these discussions since way too early this morning. Hopefully that will give you some comfort on how seriously we are taking things."

From http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1378335&postcount=353

I just got off the phone with senior management at GOA and I know you'll be getting lots of information shortly. I know it doesn't make today better but I can assure you that leadership is very aware of the situation and they are doing/going to do something about it. They are not at all happy about the situation either.

I won't say trust me on this because right now, our European fans have no reason to have any trust. I will say though to see what transpires before launch, during Open Beta and then, if we launch well, I hope we will regain your trust.

People should remember that AoC also hid a lot of what was wrong in the beta, and shouldn't keep this attitude a little over a week from launch. These could be signs of bigger troubles to come. (I'm hopeful this game is going to be good, but i'm also looking at where i have been burned in the past.)

I'm not in europe, but i'm also having problems. On my second download attempt after the first one crapped out at close to 8GB. Am i the only one wondering why you can't download "chunks"? (sadly going through fileplanet, i couldn't find any links to download from anywhere else after i entered all my preorder codes.)

In AoC I had no problems with account management atleast (although the game itself wasnt what I hoped for). WAR I cant even get into the game, so no matter if its better or worse than AoC, it fails badly in my eyes :(